How Anthony Fauci And His AIDS Industry Sacrificed One Of America’s Greatest Cancer Scientists [Chapter One]

Chapter 1.

“Snobbery? But it’s only a form of despair.”

—Joseph Brodsky

The Passion of Peter Duesberg

     The sun is hot on my head as I cross the campus of UC Berkeley, looking for Donner Lab, the oldest building on campus, where molecular biologist Peter Duesberg has recently been relocated.  I stop two students and ask for directions. They pull out a campus map; They’ve never heard of it. Finally they just give me their map and wish me luck. Eventually I find it.  To say that it is on the periphery of the campus is an understatement: It is practically in the woods.

           The Berkeley campus is looking very grand these days, its important halls adorned with impressively shaped, oblong hedges clipped to perfection. It’s very quiet. Hard to imagine this having once been a bastion of radical protest. Thanks to large donations from two pharmaceutical companies, Berkeley Science is undergoing an extensive renovation. There are bulldozers here and there, and near Donner Lab is a huge gaping hole where a building has just been demolished. In the distance, I spot Peter Duesberg,  Berkeley’s most troublesome scientist, weaving past the bulldozers on his way into the lab. In the heat of the sun, it seems to me that their jaws might just reach down and snap him up, putting a quick, merciful end to the nearly two decade long battle between the Establishment and Dr. Duesberg.

    In the 17 years since Duesberg, by invitation, wrote a paper in the prominent journal Cancer Research detailing, primarily, his critique of the then half-formed theory that ‘retroviruses’ caused leukemia, and adding almost as an afterthought that the ‘retrovirus’ HIV could by no means cause a disease such as AIDS, he’s been facing bulldozers almost wherever he goes.

Reviled by the AIDS establishment, de-funded by the NIH, ostracized and all but exiled within the university where he is a tenured professor, Duesberg was invited back to his native Germany eight years ago to resume work on cancer. During this time, commuting bi-annually between Mannheim and Berkeley, Duesberg formulated and tested a theory that has brought a new glitter to his complicated name. Some cancer-theorists say it’s nothing short of the genetic answer to cancer. Others say it is at least part of the answer. It’s lucky for Peter Duesberg that AIDS and Cancer are distinct fields.  In what is shaping up to be a denouement of Shakespearean proportions, his enemies in the AIDS field have made clear that they want him sunk to the bottom of the deepest sea, even if the answer to cancer goes with him.

      Their feelings aside, it looks as though America’s most controversial biologist may be poised for resurrection. When Scientific American recently published a lengthy article on where we stand in our understanding of cancer causation, Duesberg’s picture was on the timeline in 1999, the year he formalized and published his new theory.  He recently broke the record for undergrad students applying to study with him at UC Berkeley. Breaking a 17 year embargo against inviting Duesberg anywhere, to address anything, the NCI has invited him to its headquarters to speak on cancer. And in August, a comprehensive scientific biography of Duesberg will be published, (Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS: A Scientific Life and Times of Peter Duesberg, by Harvey Bialy, Published by The Institute of Biotechnology of The Autonomous National University of Mexico) documenting his rise, fall and possible comeback along strictly scientific standards—placing each cell he ever argued about in its rightful place, and citing only the scientific literature.

    Still, at Berkeley, where the administration remains overtly, almost flamboyantly hostile, Duesberg has had to hire a lawyer to fight for a simple raise, a so-called merit pay increase which usually comes automatically to professors of his stature, but which UC Berkeley has denied him for ten years, claiming his work is “not of high significance.”

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     If Duesberg’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he has been branded in mainstream media as the virologist who is wrong about HIV. His name entered the popular culture in the late 1980s pre-stamped with wrongness. You knew he was wrong before you knew what he had said in the first place. It wasn’t just that he was wrong, he was wrong to have even posed the question about which he was declared spectacularly wrong. He was wrong to have created an air-pocket for the public in which to even think about whether the HIV-AIDS hypothesis was right or wrong, because prior to him no such space existed, certainly no language.  And this was his real crime. The HIV-AIDS Hypothesis was an epoch defining sociological harness and scare-cloud, more than it was ever a well-grounded biological thesis. When you speak to scientists who oppose what Duesberg “did,” without exception they point to the sociological effect of his critique and say he “endangered” the public.

    Peter Duesberg created a template for a question that was not supposed to be thinkable, and which, to the AIDS industry is not only preposterous, it is virtually obscene: Does HIV really cause AIDS?

    He did so in the form of a lengthy, highly technical paper published in 1987, in the journal Cancer Research.  It was a paper that, in the words of Bialy, had “disastrous professional consequences,” for Duesberg, and “sealed his scientific fate for almost two decades.”

     Duesberg, who discovered the first so-called onco-gene and mapped the genetic structure of ‘retroviruses,’ has argued since 1987 that HIV is not pathogenic, ie not capable of killing cells, ie not the cause of AIDS, either in the industrialized world or the Third World. His case is amply documented, and by now familiar. This is not a “debate”—it is a divided earth between two sets of conclusions reached by looking at the same data.

    The cadre of scientists who signed a petition in 1991 stating they agreed with Duesberg and wanted the case re-opened included three Nobel Laureates, and up to 600 PhDs. Still, the standard paragraph in any article you’ll ever read about Duesberg will say that nobody agrees with Duesberg and that he as been “totally refuted,” “totally discredited, and even “disgraced.”  Here’s a line from Duesberg’s  absurdly blood-soaked Wikipedia page:
“A 2008 feature story on Duesberg in Discover addresses Duesberg’s role in anti-HIV drug-preventable deaths in South Africa. Jeanne Lenzer interviews prominent HIV/AIDS expert Max Essex, who suggests that…history will judge Duesberg as either “a nut who is just a tease to the scientific community” or an “enabler to mass murder” for the deaths of many AIDS patients in Africa.[3]

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